Knockabout Noel

By T.E.K.

PRIVATE LIVES by NOEL COWARD

It is always dismaying to see a gifted actor or actress destroy a well-earned reputation through arrant self-indulgence. In the past two or three years, Britain's Maggie Smith has embarked on this melancholy course, and the dispiriting results have been on livid display on the stage of Los Angeles' Ahmanson Theater for the past five weeks. Four years ago on this very stage, in The Beaux Stratagem, Maggie Smith spoke English as if it were the eighth wonder of the world. Today, as Amanda in Private Lives, she whines, gibbers and snorts with all the grace of an untutored Eliza Doolittle.

Nor is that, sad to say, all. She has become a compendium of swoops, twitches and all sorts of physical mannerisms. Los Angeles must indeed be the City of the Angels, for during the show's run its citizens poured over $100,000 a week into the coffers of this theater and got a two-bit performance in return. And more illicit box office loot lies ahead. The play moves on to Denver, Chicago, Boston, Toronto and New York.

Phlegmatic Dumbos. Amanda and Elyot (John Standing) are two fiendishly theatrical people who wear their ennui with ill-concealed hysteria. Having suffered the raptures and torments of marriage to each other, they put their hearts in a deep freeze. Divorced for several years, they are each on second honeymoons, having married two dolts from dullsville. All Coward plays are divided between two sets of people--bright, neurotic sophisticates and starchy, phlegmatic dumbos. Amanda and Elyot and their spouses meet on the adjoining verandas of a French Riviera hotel, and in no time at all Amanda and Elyot are making the glottal sounds of love again.

The first thing that seems to have escaped Director John Gielgud is his cast. It may have been too herculean a task to tone down Maggie Smith. But Gielgud ought to have elicited something more from John Standing than a replica of a rubber duck. As for the two who play the marital also-rans, Niki Flacks and Remak Ramsay, they are a tribute to only one known art--taxidermy.

What is even more puzzling is why Sir John, a man far from devoid of intellect, should have totally ignored the fact that Private Lives is a romantic comedy and not a knockabout farce to be milked for cheap, rowdy laughs. However they may strike us 44 years after the play was written, Amanda and Elyot were meant to be romantic names. The one song in the play, Some Day I'll Find You, is as seductive as a dizzying perfume. This production exudes merely a sorry stench. .T.E.K.

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